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7.3 Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Japan

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A massive 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Fukushima, triggering blackouts and a one-meter-high tsunami advisory in the region 11 years after it was devastated by a deadly quake.

The earthquake near Namie, Japan, was reported just before 11 a.m. ET on Wednesday, which is around midnight Thursday there. The Japan Meteorological Agency said the quake struck about 36 miles below the sea.

A tsunami advisory was issued but the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center later said there was no longer a threat. The Japan Meteorological Agency, however, kept a low-risk advisory in place. . .

Two aftershocks in Japan left seven people injured including six from falling objects, the station reported. An 80-year-old man was hospitalized after he tripped and sprained his leg. (Read more from “7.3 Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Japan” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

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Fukushima Robot Stranded After Stalling Inside Reactor

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1000Decommissioning work at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has suffered a setback after a robot sent in to a damaged reactor to locate melted fuel stalled hours into its mission and had to be abandoned.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said the robot stopped moving on Friday during its first inspection of the containment vessel inside reactor No 1, one of the three reactors that suffered meltdown after the plant was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

Tepco, which recently conceded that the technology for robots to retrieve the nuclear fuel had yet to be developed, said on Monday it would cut the cables to the stranded robot and postpone a similar inspection using a separate device.

Developed by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, the robot was supposed to be able to function for about 10 hours even when exposed to radiation at levels that would cause ordinary electronic devices to malfunction.

The “transformer” robot, which can alter its shape depending on its surroundings, was sent in to photograph the inside of the reactor containment vessel and record temperatures and radiation levels. (Read more from “Fukushima Robot Stranded After Stalling Inside Reactor” HERE)

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Fukushima Radiation Has Officially Reached North American Shores

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RadiationSeaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has reached North America.

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution detected small amounts of cesium-134 and cesium-137 in a sample of seawater taken in February from a dock on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

It’s the first time radioactivity from the March 2011 triple meltdown has been identified on West Coast shores.

Woods Hole chemical oceanographer Ken Buesseler emphasized that the radiation is at very low levels that aren’t expected to harm human health or the environment.

“Even if the levels were twice as high, you could still swim in the ocean for six hours every day for a year and receive a dose more than a thousand times less than a single dental X-ray,” Buesseler said. “While that’s not zero, that’s a very low risk.” (Read more from “Fukushima Radiation Has Reached North American Shores” HERE)

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Fukushima Fall-Out Fears as Double the Normal Amount of Radiation is Found on San Fran Beach, in Missouri Snow (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Marie-louise Olson.

A beach in San Francisco contains five times the safe levels of radiation fueling concerns that Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant’s crisis is impacting areas across the country.

It comes just days after radiation readings were found to be double the normal amount in Missouri’s recent snowfall.

According to YouTube user, DutchSinse, who posted a video of him taking the Geiger readings in St Louis, the findings mean that ‘small particles of radioactive material are indeed coming down in the precipitation. Past tests show around 30CPM in the same spot on a nice day with no precipitation’.

He said snowstorms in 2012 also showed alert level radiation readings.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AFP Photo / Spencer Platt

Photo Credit: AFP Photo / Spencer Platt

Officials reject concerns over 500 percent radiation increase on California beach

Health officials in California are now telling residents not to worry after a video uploaded to the internet last month seemed to show high levels of radiation at a Pacific Coast beach.

The video, “Fukushima radiation hits San Francisco,” has been viewed nearly half-a-million times since being uploaded to YouTube on Christmas Eve, and its contents have caused concern among residents who fear that nuclear waste from the March 2011 disaster in Japan may be arriving on their side of the Pacific Ocean.

Throughout the course of the seven-minute-long clip, a man tests out his Geiger counter radiation detector while walking through Pacifica State Beach outside of San Francisco. At times, the monitor on the machine seems to show radiation of 150 counts-per-minute, or the equivalent of around five times what is typically found in that type of environment.

After the video began to go viral last month, local, state and federal officials began to investigate claims that waste from the Fukushima nuclear plant has washed ashore in California. Only now, though, are authorities saying that they have no reason to believe that conditions along the West Coast are unsafe.

Read more from this story HERE.

[Editor’s Note: The source story is from RT News. RT News originates from Russia and has alleged connections to the Russian government.]

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UPDATE: Removal of nuclear fuel at Fukushima plant resumes

By THE ASAHI SHIMBUN. Work to remove nuclear fuel from a damaged reactor building at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was proceeding smoothly as efforts resumed Jan. 6 after the conclusion of the New Year’s holidays.

Work initially got under way on Nov. 18 at the storage pool of the damaged No. 4 reactor building to remove 1,533 nuclear fuel assemblies, but was suspended Dec. 22 for the holiday period.

Two officials from the Fukushima prefectural government’s safety management division observed the resumption of the removal work for an hour during the afternoon of Jan. 7.

Read more from this story HERE.
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Fukushima: Dispelling the Myths

By Joel I. Cehn. Wild speculation on the widespread dangers of Fukushima radioactive fallout has been popping up lately, including posts on the Internet with titles like “Holy Fukushima—Radiation From Japan Is Already Killing North Americans.” These are thin on facts and create more heat than light. But they do certainly grab our attention. For example, videos and news out of California and Missouri claim that high levels of radiation were detected. What they mean is “higher” levels of ambient radiation. Higher than what? Well, higher than measured elsewhere. Here’s the bottom line: natural levels vary a lot. I can see large variations around my own neighborhood. Tenfold differences are not unusual. This is due to a lot of factors, including ground cover, building materials, minerals in the soil, and even weather conditions.

It is true that the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami wreaked havoc on Japan. It also resulted in the largest nuclear power plant accident since Chernobyl when the tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Radioactive particles were released into the atmosphere and ocean, which effectively closed local Japanese fisheries.

While there were unfortunate effects from the disaster around the Fukushima Power Plant in Japan, the facts show that people in Alaska, Hawaii, and the West Coast of the United States aren’t in any danger.

The fuel rods in the Fukushima power plant partially melted and radionuclides were released into the ocean. To a lesser extent, radionuclides were also released into the air and were absorbed by the ocean when they rained down upon it. These two pathways introduced mostly iodine-131, cesium-137, cesium-134, and strontium-90 into the area surrounding the power plant. Only two of those remain today (cesium-137 and strontium-90), because the other two radionuclides have short half-lives and have since decayed away.

We have no accurate estimates of how much of each of these radionuclides was released into the ocean, but the current estimates are above levels released by the Three Mile Island accident, but below levels released by the Chernobyl accident. How much will reach the U.S. West Coast? Answer: not much—certainly not enough to increase radiation levels five- or tenfold. Claims of such increases are the tip-off that facts are being sacrificed for attention. The good news is that factual information is available to those interested, and this Health Physics Society website is a good place to start.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fukushima? Strange Flu Hitting Pilots, Attendants at Alaska Airlines (+video)

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Photo Credit: Free Patriot

Photo Credit: Free Patriot

A strange illness has been attacking flight attendants and pilots employed by Alaska Airlines. On December 23 and 24th, twenty four flights were cancelled due to a lack of personnel. Bobbie Egan, spokesman for Alaska Airlines, stated a “very unusual” cold and flu season hit the airline’s Pacific Northwest hub, and the entire region was affected.” The outage affected 270 passengers.

While the airline is calling it a flu, there is some speculation that the story is a cover for something else. There is a mysterious flu hitting the southeast and Texas, but there didn’t seem to be a “companion” statement from the Center for Disease Control that often follows the diagnosis of that flu. It would seem that if the Alaska Airlines flight crews were struck with the mysterious flu of the Southeast, the CDC would have issued a statement as they have in other instances.

What could be going on? This has certainly been an odd year for Alaska Airlines flight crews!

Read more from this story HERE.

Ocean Plume from Japan Nuke Disaster Will Reach U.S. by 2014

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nuclear attackWithin three years of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown that was triggered by a tsunami in Japan in March 2011, the radioactive ocean plume resulting from the disaster will reach the shores of the United States, researchers say.

However, according to the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, by the time the plume hits the west coast of the United States it is expected to be harmless.

“Observers on the west coast of the United States will be able to see a measurable increase in radioactive material three years after the event,” Erik van Sebille, one of the paper’s authors, said in a news release from the research council.

“However,” he added, “people on those coastlines should not be concerned, as the concentration of radioactive material quickly drops below World Health Organization safety levels as soon as it leaves Japanese waters.”

Within four months of the incident, two currents off the coast of Japan, known as the Kuroshio Current and the Kurushio Extension, diluted the radioactive material to levels considered safe by the WHO, the authors of the report said.

Read more from this story HERE.

NOAA Scientist: Experiment Suggests Worst of Fukushima “still on the way”

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It’s been over a year since natural disaster ravaged a nuclear plant in Fukushima and interrupted the lives of millions of Japanese. Scientists now fear though that contaminated water is on course to America, and it could be more toxic than thought.

Researchers have released the findings of an intense study into the aftermath of last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster and warn that the United States isn’t exactly spared just yet. In fact, scientists now fear that incredibly contaminated ocean waters could be reaching the West Coast of the US in a matter of only five years, and the toxicity of those waves could eventually be worse than what was seen in Japan.

A team of scientists led by Joke F Lübbecke of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory have published the findings of an experiment recently conducted to measure the impact of last year’s nuclear disaster and the results are eye-opening to say the least. By simulating the spreading of contaminated ocean waters and seeing how currents could carry them across the Pacific from Japan to the US, scientists believe that the worst might be still on the way.

“Within one year it will have spread over the entire western half of the North Pacific and in five years we predict it will reach the US West Coast.” Claus Böning, co-author of the study, tells the website Environmentalresearchweb.

Böning adds that “The levels of radiation that hit the US coast will be small relative to the levels released by Fukushima,” yet fails to exactly stand by that statement in the fullest. “But we cannot estimate accurately what those levels will be because we do not know for certain what was released by Fukushima,” the doctor adds.  In fact, others fear that contaminated ocean waters may collect in packets and produce waves of highly concentrated nuclear toxins that could pose a dangerous toll to Americans.

Read more from this story HERE.

Publisher’s note:  This article was originally published by RT News.  Shortly after posting, Restoring Liberty received a voice mail from Ms. Jana Goldman, a ” NOAA Communication officer.”  Ms. Goldman reported that the scientist involved in the above-referenced study regarding Fukushima was not actually with NOAA at the time the report was prepared.  Rather, she was with a team from Germany, even though she is now employed by NOAA.  Ms. Goldman confirmed this information by email as well.

Photo credit: Ryan Somma